On several ocasions, Hélio Oiticica, probably Brazil's most famous twentieth-century artist, describes the work of US film-maker and performance artist Jack Smith as the precursor of his 'Quase-Cinema' slide-show environments and 'subterranean TROPICÁLIA' projects (1971-76). Highlighting the importance of Smith and Mario Montez, an actor and icon of the queer film and theatre scene, for New York's underground in the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, Oiticica developed the term 'tropicamp' in 1971 to characterise a resistant element in the gradual commercialisation of queer aesthetics at the time. His text 'MARIO MONTEZ, TROPICAMP' from that year is an exemplary description of an attitude that is traceable in Oiticica's own work from the early 1960s onwards, and which would become overt in his later work. One might consider the notion of 'tropicamp' as a well-put critique of how consumerism was expanding into the field of avant-garde art that he encountered in New York. Oiticica's tropicamp version of the underground --Subterrânia-- was nothing less than a counter-model to a predominantly white and neobourgeois normalisation process of camp culture after 1968.

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz is a writer and independent researcher. He has published on diverse topics such as the colonial history and economy of globalisation, the history of drugs in general and cocaine in particular, and on materialst notions of cultural critique and post-war philosophy.